In Search of Secret Gardens, Reader Edition

When we asked readers recently what you wanted to see more of on Gardenista, about a zillion of you responded to our survey (thanks, by the way) to say you'd love to visit more of your neighbors' gardens—the tantalizing ones you get to glimpse through a hedge or when a gate swings open. They're your favorites, you said. Guess what? Ours too.

The best gardens are personal. They couldn't belong to anyone on earth except the people who created them. Do you have a garden like that? Or maybe you know someone who does. If so, we'd like to feature that garden on Gardenista. Here's how:

Email photos or a link to your photos to us at edit(at)remodelista.com.

If we choose your garden, we will feature it in an upcoming Garden Visit post.

Earlier today, we featured Matt Larkin and Lainie Grant's topiary garden in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. For more inspiration, here are a few favorite private gardens we've featured recently:

Above: To kick off the series about readers' gardens, we visited screenwriter Maria Nation in western Massachusetts, at her home in Ashley Falls where she's taught herself cloud pruning to create a garden with good bones. Excellent bones, actually. For more, see A Secret Garden: Beauty in the Berkshires. Photograph by Maria Nation.

Above: When Michael Leva, a New York-based fashion creative director, bought an 18th century farmhouse on four acres nine years ago, the gardens were in disrepair; he fixed that. For more, see A Secret Garden: Spring Comes to Connecticut. Photograph courtesy of Michael Leva.

Above: Samantha Greenwood, the special events chef at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, grows a high and wild tangle of 80 varieties of roses in her garden. "I don't want little rose bushes in a line," she says. "I love being lost in them." For more, see "A Riot in Berkeley: Roses Gone Wild." Photograph by Mimi Giboin.

Above: On the outskirts of San Francisco's Sunset District surfer neighborhood, restaurant owners Dave Muller and Lana Porcello grow menu items in a greenhouse they built out of wood scraps and discarded windows. For more, see "Steal This Look: A Potting Shed Made of Scraps." Photograph by Michelle Slatalla.

Above: When architect Nicolas Soulier and ceramicist Cécile Daladier started their entryway garden, they were looking for the rain, the wind, and the sky in between Paris' seven story buildings. They filled the garden with zinc mirror ponds to reflect the sunlight shining though their building's light well. For more, see A Ceramacist and an Architect in Paris.

(N.B.: This is an update of a post originally published November 14, 2012.)